Offshore Repair Platform, Adjustable Rotor Shaft, Glowing Tires

This week we discuss Flender’s adjustable rotor shaft assembly, designed to mitigate gear misalignment issues. Then Dolfines’ innovative solution for onsite repairs of floating wind platforms using a telescoping crane. Finally, we highlight Goodyear’s fun and practical glow-in-the-dark tires, which can help locate your vehicle in the dark and add a unique aesthetic touch.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the uptime podcast focused on the new hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future.

All right, our first idea of the week is an adjustable rotor shaft assembly for wind turbines. And as we know, there’s all kinds of issues with anything rotating equipment on a wind turbine. Particularly if it involves gears and teeth. Well, this idea from Flender describes an adjustable rotor shaft assembly for connecting a gearbox to the generator.

And the key feature is it uses a curved tooth coupling with the releasable support element which allows the both ends to move relative to one another, which And a lot of wind turbines, if you’ve been up in them, there is a lot of movement at times, and it lets that misalignment not destroy. The assembly.

And this is really slick because we have all kinds of issues, like I’ve said, on anything with teeth, on, on some of these bigger wind turbines as the, the blades get bigger and they get taller and everything’s moving around. Phil, this makes a lot of sense. I’d be surprised if Flinders not using this already though.

Philip Totaro: Yes, I would hope so. We haven’t been able to confirm it, but presumably for the turbines with larger capacity gearboxes for the, the larger onshore machines and maybe even some of the offshore ones. I would hope that this technology is being utilized because it will absolutely help make a difference in kind of bending moment and gear misalignment issues which can create a lot of maintenance work for, for the turbines.

While the services folks may not be happy about it because they might be losing some, losing some revenue opportunities the owners and operators absolutely would love this kind of technology to be implemented because it’s it’s going to allow for a gearbox to be able to, to be operated in a slightly wider loads window which is also kind of an interesting application to this because, even in a market like the U.

S. where we know that a lot of owners and operators are, are kind of PTC farming. They’re not just wind farming. And what that means is they want to be able to extract as much out of the turbine as they can. for the first 10 years of, of an asset life. A technology like this might actually be helpful in making sure that the gearbox lasts the full 10 years before you see any kind of major drop off in performance.

So any technology where you can accommodate this kind of gear misalignment is going to be a good one for owners and operators and, and the gearbox manufacturers themselves.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I mean, if you have a small rigid component then you can have a fixed gear, fixed location. It’s easy to keep it in line where you don’t have a whole lot of crazy loads on it.

But like, Allen was saying at the beginning of the section here, when you’re bent, if you’ve been up tower at all, these things are moving all over the place. And when you start to get to these larger size turbines and bed plates starting getting really big and things start to flex and move. Having a little bit of basically give in the connections can go a long ways to increasing longevity.

So, it’d be a little bit more of a complicated thing for some, uptower technicians if something goes wrong with it. However, the idea behind the invention is that we won’t have things go wrong. So, this one has some, some good application in the real world.

Allen Hall: Our second idea comes from Dolfines.

And as we know, floating wind is, holds great promise. And, but one of the drawbacks to it is when things go wrong with a turbine, you pretty much have to drag that floating platform all the way back to port and to work on it. And. That can be a problem at times, as we’ve seen recently with some wind turbines over in Northern Europe dragging them back takes a long time as it’s expensive.

So, the Dolfines’ approach is a little bit different where they have a crane on the floating platform and with a telescoping boom on it where they can get access to the blades. So, the way this, this patent idea works is that, They have some handling equipment and they can remove and reinstall blades without the need for any vessels to be out there or the need to tow the floating platform back to port.

This, I think, holds promise, Phil, in that if floating wind is really going to be economical, the turbine size is going to have to get big, but that just increases the complexity, and you really want to repair it on site, putting some sort of crane on the floating platform. Does make sense.

Philip Totaro: Yes. And this, their, their idea is kind of twofold.

As you mentioned, part of it is putting the telescoping crane on the floating platform itself, either if it’s a a, you’re, you’re going to have a bit of trouble if it’s a kind of a spar buoy design, but for, other types of semi submersible arrangements, you can, you can actually have one of the pontoons actually have this this crane embedded but they also have an idea to include this telescopic crane on a jackup vessel as well.

And so the, the core idea of the patent, again, is this telescopic crane, which by itself isn’t necessarily a new idea, but the placement and arrangement of these, and, and again, keep in mind, Dolfines is a oil and gas company that’s got, decades worth of experience in, in Europe in supporting that, that industry.

So they know how to solve problems and their, their solution as far as supporting, floating offshore or even fixed offshore with this kind of, there’s, there’s another company that came up with the quote unquote jackup on a jackup, so we won’t call it that, but the telescoping crane on a jackup vessel is is also a pretty clever way to, to go about it.

So I like it again, keep in mind that this is one they’re not actually using commercially yet, but we think with increasing crane size or with significant deployment of floating offshore platforms, they could. Eventually implement this kind of a solution and, and it’s something I’d actually like to see because it, it would help cut down on, on some, some service and repair costs substantially.

Joel Saxum: When it comes to offshore construction, the two terms that always get thrown around for op enduring operations is coupled or decoupled. So when you talk about a decoupled activity, that would be what we do right now. So you may have a crane on a jackup or on a floating barge or something, go out to where the monopile is in, installed into the seafloor, and those two pieces of infrastructure, the monopile and the vessel are decoupled.

They’re not connected whatsoever. So you have to deal with, movement and moments in both of them. So if the sea settle or the sea floor settles at all, the jackup can move. Or if the, if you get some high currents or something or some wind, you can get the, the monopile can move. And now these two pieces of.

of kit are decoupled. They’re not together. So they move independently of one another and that makes things difficult. This concept from the floating side is coupling them together because you’re putting the crane right onto the same foundation. Now that foundation is a like, like for like the common denominator, if you will, that they move together.

So you can now do, do operations in a lot easier way. Because if you try to go out to a floating platform Your vessel is not going to be a jackup anymore because the jackup legs cannot reach the bottom because it’s going to be too deep. So now you’re going to have two floating vessels moving in six degrees of freedom all the time.

And it’s almost going to be impossible to swap components out or land studs and bolt holes and those kinds of things. But you couple them together, all of a sudden you can do it. So great, great innovation. I think that, like you said, Phil, if, as we get to floating offshore wind at scale, something like this has to happen.

Otherwise, we won’t get to scale. So, we’ll see this one in the future, I’m sure.

Allen Hall: Our last idea is a, a fun patent from the engineers over at Goodyear Tire and Rubber. Now, the scenario goes like this. It’s a dark night. It’s raining outside. You’re in a large parking lot after attending a concert.

And you say to yourself, I do not know where I parked. If only if I had tires that glow to the dark. I could find my vehicle. Well, the engineers have already come up with this because Goodyear has a patent for it, where they are putting glow in the dark material in the sidewall of your tire and it will glow.

Now, I, Phil, I do not understand why this is not being used today because they would sell, Millions of these tires.

Philip Totaro: Allen, I got news for you. There’s, there’s two other very important applications and use cases beyond finding your car in the dark. The one is for the folks out there that want to be able to pimp their ride.

This is number one way to pimp your ride. is glow in the dark tires, okay? The second one is, for those of us who, who follow motor racing, and particularly the World Endurance Championship, they do a lot of night racing, and wouldn’t it be cool to have glow in the dark tires during the 24 hours of Le Mans?

Joel Saxum: I’m with Phil more on the pimp my ride thing here. I’m in, I’m in Texas, and you should see some of the ridiculous vehicles that drive around here. On the outside of that, there is there’s some legal ramifications here, but I don’t know if it is, because there’s like a, there’s laws that say you can’t have light up, like, valve stems, so you make these, they call them fireflies, make, there’s laws that say you can’t have some of that stuff, but this technically Isn’t battery powered, isn’t doesn’t have a filament in it, isn’t an LED.

So I don’t know, maybe they will pass muster. Well, we’d have to ask the authorities.

Allen Hall: It’s powered by the sun or some sort of nuclear reactor. I’m not sure how this material works, but it is clearly cool. And someone on the TikTok side of Goodyear needs to go back and take a look at this and get this out.

Even if they did it in NASCAR. They would sell tens of millions of this if it’s on Dale Earnhardt Jr. ‘s car. It would go crazy.